


Object Lessons in the Perils of Sleep Deprivation

by NightsMistress



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Exhaustion, Fluff, M/M, post: episode 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 16:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8997454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: It’s when Victor and Yuuri enter the elevator of their run-down Beijing hotel that the well of Yuuri’s stamina runs dry. It's a pity, really, as Victor had wanted to reward him.Or: a coda to episode 7.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BonesOfBirdWings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BonesOfBirdWings/gifts).



> My thanks to shadow_lover for the beta ♥

It’s when Victor and Yuuri enter the elevator of their run-down Beijing hotel that the well of Yuuri’s stamina runs dry. His memories of everything after the podium are scattered: Phichit taking selfies and promising Yuuri that he has immortalized the moment that Victor showed his love for Yuuri on Instagram; Chris giving Victor his room number with a lascivious suggestion that they come and visit later; staring blankly at journalists in the post-event interviews while Victor speaks for him about his plans for greater heights with his theme of love. He’d made it from the competitors’ area to the hotel lobby on sheer adrenaline, as well as the startled delight that lingers after Victor flung himself at Yuuri after his routine.

Now he stares at the rows of buttons inside an elevator that has seen better days, and is entirely unable to remember which room their shared hotel room is on. It’s hard to focus on the floor numbers, and not only because his glasses are in the pocket of Victor’s suit jacket. The Western-style numbers refuse to hold still, and everything is so bright and discordant. He feels simultaneously brittle and numb, nerves jangling even while everything is syrupy slow and muffled to his ears.

He jumps as Victor reaches over his shoulder to select the correct floor. The doors close with a chime that cuts through his head like shattering glass, and then the elevator jerks upwards. Yuuri staggers and falls into Victor, who grunts at Yuuri’s unexpected weight but catches and steadies him. It’s nice leaning against Victor like this, and Yuuri allows himself to stay there for a brief moment, eyes fluttering closed.

“Yuuri, are you awake?” Victor says, and Yuuri opens his eyes to squint at his surroundings. He’s sagged against Victor, cheek pressed against Victor’s collarbone as if it belongs there, with Victor’s forearm across his chest holding him up. This close he can smell the cologne that Victor uses, a clean, spicy smell that makes him want to stay nestled inside the shell of Victor’s body and inhale it forever.

Unfortunately, it looks like they are at their destination, and so Yuuri straightens instead, balancing clumsily on legs that feel like green twigs. Victor’s concern is naked in his sea-green eyes as he helps Yuuri stumble out of the elevator into the corridor for their floor, and Yuuri smiles an apology.

“Sorry, Victor,” he says, English sounding heavy and strange in his mouth. He finds it hard to pronounce his ‘r’s correctly, and his tongue feels thick and slow. His lips are numb too, but he’s not sure if that’s exhaustion or that they, like the rest of him, are too overwhelmed by the kiss from earlier that day. “I know I should have slept last night.”

Yuuri staggers down the corridor, Victor a long dark shadow in a tailored suit by his side. His feet ache and cramp at each footfall, and his knees and hips feel like there are knives nestled inside the joints and they are carving their way out with exquisite slowness. The bone-deep ache cuts through the fog of exhaustion, and Yuuri suspects the flight back to Hasetsu is going to be dreadful. He has a visceral understanding of why no one has tried to land a quadruple flip at the end of their free skate in a competition before. He _hurts_ in a way that is going to be all the more pressing over the next few days, and that’s even before he tries to fold himself into an airplane seat for the flight home. 

The physical pain is worth it to surprise and delight Victor in the same way that Victor has surprised and delighted Yuuri over the years. Even now, when Yuuri feels like a poorly strung doll that is in the process of slowly unravelling, he thinks it was worth it. It’s not every day that you kiss in public someone who you’ve idolized since you were a child, them overcome with emotion by something _you_ did thanks to their (admittedly rather poor) guidance. Yuuri suspects, though, that if he wanted to he could kiss Victor wherever he wants. It’s a dizzying feeling, having a skating legend like putty in your hands.

“We’re here,” Victor says, resting his hand on Yuuri’s shoulder when Yuuri keeps blindly walking. “Do you have your keycard?”

Yuuri stares at the door for a long moment, trying to make sense of what Victor has said, before fumbling at the door handle. The handle twists only fractionally, and the light on the key reader glows a baleful red. He tries the door handle again, hoping dully that this time the door will open.

Victor’s hand slips into the pocket of Yuuri’s JSF black windcheater, withdrawing with the plastic keycard caught between two fingers. He swipes the card through the key reader with a swoop of his hand and the light changes to green. Yuuri blinks at the change before trying the door handle a third time, and is rewarded by the door opening.

“Inside, Yuuri,” Victor urges as he pushes the door inwards. Yuuri stops, blinking heavily, at the doorway, and Victor places his hand between Yuuri’s shoulder blades to gently push him through the door.

Someone has cleaned up the hotel room since Yuuri and Victor were last in it, straightening the linens on the hard single bed that he and Victor had shared several hours ago and laying Yuuri’s discarded casual clothes on the neatened bed cover. Victor’s bed is also straightened, though it lacks Victor’s clothes from the previous day. They must have been hung up in the wardrobe, which Yuuri appreciates. Victor’s suits are a silk blend that is a wonder to touch, and it would be a terrible shame if they were to be creased because of Victor’s thoughtlessness.

Victor bounces in after Yuuri, energized in a way that exhausts Yuuri to watch. He does anyway, because even after months out of competitive skating Victor’s movements are effortlessly graceful and beautiful.

“I was thinking that instead of going out for dinner tonight, we order room service,” Victor says. “What do you say?”

“I’m not hungry,” Yuuri replies. He knows he should eat, that in a few hours he will wake up ravenous and will raise the bar fridge to the detriment of his competition diet, but right now the thought of eating seems too much.

“ _Yuuri_ ,” Victor chides, dragging out the long vowels of his name into a brief snatch of song. “As your coach, I insist that you eat.” He says this casually, even brightly, but there’s a bite of steel underneath.

Yuuri had ignored that tone earlier, and has the bruises to show for it. He sighs, which Victor takes as an agreement, and picks up his sleep clothes from where they have been laid out on his bed. “I’ll have a shower in the meantime,” he mumbles, which is a concession.

“Good,” Victor says immediately. “You’ll stink otherwise.”

Sometimes Yuuri forgets how blunt Victor can be.

“Yeah,” he says, and makes his cautious way to the bathroom. He had memorized the layout of their room when he arrived at the hotel earlier that week, and is able to navigate his way around without his glasses, but his depth perception is all off and his vision blurs with exhaustion. He starts to strip off his jacket before remembering that the bathroom door is open, and kicks it shut with his foot. Victor’s disappointed sigh is audible through the thin walls of the bathroom. Yuuri strips off his clothes and dumps them on the floor.

Usually, after a performance like this, especially when he hasn’t slept the night before, Yuuri will masturbate in the shower and then drowse off either in the shower or on top of his blankets while still damp and naked. He and Celestino had separate rooms for as long as he had been competing professionally, and so there was little risk of his coach walking in on Yuuri mid-tug or afterward in the post-orgasm lassitude. It’s a conversation he hadn’t wanted to have with Victor while they were booking the hotel room, nor that he thinks about Victor while he masturbates: Victor pliant and submissive to Yuuri’s gentle direction, Victor gazing up at Yuuri with naked joy and desire, Victor saying _I’m yours_ with his voice rough and almost incoherent with need as Yuuri brings him to climax.

The walls are too thin for him to masturbate to that now, not with Victor right in the next room, and he doesn’t want Victor to have to come and rescue him from the shower and put him to bed like an overtired child. He turns the shower on, cranking it as hot as it will go, and the plumbing thumps and bangs as it begins to operate. Yuuri doesn’t hold out much hope of the water being very hot — not in this worn-out hotel that hasn’t been refitted since the 1980s at _least_ — but it will have to do until he can return to the hot springs of Hasetsu. 

He sits down on the shower floor, the old tiles slowly soaking up the heat from the water falling far above his head, and washes the gel out of his hair, the sweat off his skin. The hot water loosens knots in his muscles as his fingers explore the bruises blossoming on his skin. There, on his hip, is a starkly purple-black bruise the size of his palm from when he fell after the quadruple loop. Yuuri had barely noticed the pain of the impact at the time, as he had been focused on getting back up and showing the world what Victor means to him. His feet are crossed with fluid-filled blisters and black bruises, and it hurts to rotate his ankles and bend his toes, bend his knees and lift his legs. When he returns to Hasetsu, he’ll need to see a sports physiotherapist if he wants to be in peak condition for the Rostelcom Cup. He should have brought one with him. Next time.

He leans against the glass of the shower wall, legs extended, and lets the water beat down on him from above. He smiles, exhausted but pleased, as he recalls the way that Victor flung himself at him after his free skate, as if his response to Yuuri’s message in his free skate could not be contained in the kiss and cry, bowling Yuuri off his feet and surprising him with a kiss. Victor will always surprise his audience, and it’s intoxicating to know that passion is focused on Yuuri alone. _Don’t look away from me,_ Yuuri had commanded, and Victor obeyed. Will always obey, it seems, and Yuuri likes that.

He reaches up, fumbles for the faucet, and turns the water off. It’s hard to get up now that the hot water has relaxed him this far, but the thought of Victor in the next room, waiting patiently for him to come out with his hair damp and dressed for bed gets him to his feet. Victor, dressed in his three piece suit that Yuuri itches to take from him one article of clothing at a time, to undress him with the steady, confident patience that Yuuri did not realize he had inside him until Victor coaxed it out over the last few months. His dick aches, already half-hard at the thought, and Yuuri can’t help but crack a grin at the sight. Even now, after being awake for the entire Cup of China, Victor has the ability to inspire.

He dresses, towels his hair off, and makes his way cautiously back into their hotel bedroom. Victor has already shed the suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair he’s sitting in, to Yuuri’s disappointment, and is scanning something on his phone. He looks up at Yuuri’s entrance and smiles. 

“I thought you had fallen asleep in there!”

“Not quite,” Yuuri says as he sits down on the edge of his bed. Victor has put his glasses on the bedside table and he puts them on, blinking as the world does not quite come completely back into focus. “I didn’t want to disappoint you after you ordered room service. Now are you going to tell me what you ordered?”

“No!” Victor says brightly, pointing in the air with his finger. “You’ll have to wait and see.” He gets up and sits next to Yuuri, his knees almost touching Yuuri’s. Once, Yuuri might have thought that was simply because the bed is a narrow single and Victor is tall and long-limbed, but now he knows it’s because he’s opened up enough to let Victor in. He opens further, leaning towards Victor and closing his eyes.

The first kiss is gentle and soft with a promise of passion and fire banked inside it. Victor’s lips are inviting, and he makes eager noises in the back of his throat that delight and incite Yuuri to do better next time.

After they break apart, Yuuri confesses, “I’m … kind of glad that Makkachin isn’t around right now. I don’t think I’d have the courage to have done that if he was.”

“I think you underestimate yourself,” Victor says, eyes wide and dark and dazed. “Besides, he wouldn’t mind. He likes you.” He picks up the poodle-shaped tissue box on the bedside table, raises it in front of his face, and makes barking noises. It’s such a quintessentially _Victor_ thing to do that Yuuri finds himself giggling helplessly in the face of it.

“Victor,” he manages. “I don’t think I could kiss you in front of your _dog_.”

“Then how about we put him away?” Victor says. He lobs the tissue box over his bed in an easy arc, out of sight and out of mind. It’s not what Yuuri means, but the thought of _Victor Nikiforov_ being such a goofball is endearing, as well as weirdly hot.

The second kiss is more passionate, now that Yuuri has caught his second wind. Victor’s mouth tastes of coffee and some Russian chocolate bar that Victor eats after every performance. Yuuri’s grasping fingers pull through Victor’s hair. He whimpers with pleasure as Yuuri grazes Victor’s bottom lip with his teeth, his fingers tightening their grip on Yuuri’s hair convulsively. Yuuri starts to move down from Victor’s mouth to the hollow of his throat to licks the skin there, and is rewarded by Victor’s shudders. Yuuri starts to unbutton Victor’s vest very slowly, deliberately, kissing Victor’s neck with each unfastened button.

Then someone knocks on the door and Victor pulls away fractionally, reluctantly.

“We can ignore it,” Yuuri suggests breathily. “They’ll leave the tray outside the door.”

“No,” Victor says, the words sounding like they’re drawn out of him with pliers. “As your coach I should insist that you eat.”

He breaks away and Yuuri moans as he clutches at Victor’s shirt collar to try and keep Victor in place. “Victor, it’s fine.”

Victor puts his hand on Yuuri’s shoulder as he stands up. “I’ll be back,” he promises.He shucks off his now unbuttoned vest and leaves it on the floor.

“I know,” Yuuri says. From here, he can see the way his hands have disheveled Victor’s hair, where his teeth have left Victor’s lips swollen, the darkness of desire in his eyes. He likes that Victor wears these marks that Yuuri put on him, that it doesn’t even occur to him to try and hide them from the world. It’s a reminder to everyone that Victor is _his_ , that Yuuri has taken him from the ice skating world, and that only Yuuri has Victor’s love.

Victor has a brief, friendly conversation with the hotel staff member who brought up the food, and Yuuri lets his mind drift. As Victor brings the room service food tray in and kicks the door shut with his foot, Yuuri’s head snaps up from where it had lolled forward. He recognizes the smell of deep-fried pork and he looks at Victor in disbelief.

“But I didn’t win,” Yuuri says slowly. Second is okay, second is acceptable, if only because it is a step towards winning, but he didn’t _win_. Silver is a consolation prize, a salve to Yuuri’s stung pride, but it is hardly worth celebrating with katsudon. It almost feels insulting that Victor might try to do that.

“Ah, but you won the audience’s hearts, including my own,” Victor says with a giddy smile, which is such a cheesy thing for him to say that Yuuri can’t help but laugh.

“You don’t agree?” Victor says as he gives Yuuri his katsudon and starts to eat his own with a fork. 

“I think we can discuss it later.” Breaking the disposable chopsticks apart takes more concentration than Yuuri expects. 

The katsudon is terrible, as it turns out, but some of that may be due to Yuuri forcing it down because he knows that he must eat. He clumsily picks his way through the vegetables and deep-fried pork, chopsticks feeling awkward between his fingers, and ultimately gives up on the rice. It feels like a minor achievement that he doesn’t spill it onto the floor.

“This is really bad,” Victor says. “When you win your next competition, we will have to wait until you get home before you eat katsudon again.”

Yuuri hums his agreement and leans against Victor’s shoulder, half-eaten katsudon abandoned on his lap. Now that he has eaten and showered, the brittle twitchiness of earlier has melted away, leaving a comfortable lassitude and a dim comfortable awareness that he is one step closer towards competing in the Grand Prix Final. It’s a thought that should make him nervous, given his spectacular failure last year, but right now, with Victor by his side as he extols the virtues of his mother’s katsudon, Yuuri doesn’t mind. 

“Ah, Yuuri,” Victor says on a sigh as he plucks the katsudon from Yuuri’s lap and places it on the floor. “You should have listened to me. I was looking forward to rewarding you for your hard work today.”

“Tomorrow,” Yuuri promises hazily. Victor’s hands are insistent as they guide him down to his bed. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”

Victor laughs, soft and gentle. “I look forward to seeing it,” he says, smoothing Yuri’s damp hair from his face. There’s too much to untangle in the way that Victor’s smile becomes soft and his gaze fond when he looks at Yuuri, and Yuuri’s too exhausted to make sense of it right now. He catches at Victor’s tie. Victor lets him. Lets Yuuri pull him down on top of him, a heavy weight that has become comforting over the last few months. Victor the legend is ephemeral and airy, while Victor the man who is in Yuuri’s bed is surprisingly solid and real as he kisses Yuuri’s hairline.

“Stay here,” Yuuri mumbles, and doesn’t know what language he says it in. He isn’t sure that it matters. 

Victor stays.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Too Tired To... (the Stammi Vicino remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12040182) by [Lady_Ganesh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh)




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